Leading US Magazine Exposes Evolution’s Tall Tales!

The major American magazine The American Spectator in its current issue devotes most of its pages to this theme: what American students often learn in their public schools is just plain wrong.

The major American
magazine The American Spectator in its current issue (December 2000 - January
2001) devotes most of its pages to this theme: what American students
often learn in their public schools is just plain wrong. In particular,
the teaching of evolution as fact in science texts is singled out and
receives 10 pages of coverage in this special edition.

Although none of the
four writers apparently accepts a literal reading of the Book of Genesis,
they have nevertheless provided a useful public service in compiling a
litany of fakes, frauds, and faulty science that still appear in highly
used science textbooks that indoctrinate young people in “molecules-to-man”
evolution. Many of these texts are college-level, where one would think
that the caliber of scholarship would certainly be a notch higher.

Survival of the
fakest, not fittest

In a hard-hitting
exposé (“Survival of the Fakest”) of evolutionists’ gaffes
and quackeries, Dr Jonathan Wells (Ph.D., Biology, U.C. Berkeley) lists
seven “pillars of Darwinian theory” that are featured in many science
books today (including standard texts that have seen many printings1)
yet are patently incorrect, and are KNOWN by the general scientific community
to be wrong.

If you attended government
schools anywhere in the world, you were probably wrongly taught that the
following were facts, as Dr Wells debunks:

that
the famous Miller/Urey experiment of 1953 supposedly produced the building
blocks of life in a test tube.

The
truth: Miller/Urey had to have a hydrogen-rich atmosphere for their
experiment. Yet for almost 30 years, scientists involved in this field
of research have concluded that the early atmosphere of Earth was
quite different from this. So while their experiment does not work
at all, some texts (e.g. Molecular Biology of the Cell by Alberts)
continue to inform students that the first step to creating life was
overcome by Miller and Urey. See also Q&A: Origin of Life.

that
embryos in vertebrates are virtually identical in their early stages,
which is evidence of descent from a common evolutionary ancestor.

The
truth: this was an outright fraud first perpetrated over 100
years ago as “science’. Incredibly, the doctored drawings of embryonic
similarity have been known to be false for about 100 years, and yet
Dr Wells reports that “most current biology textbooks” feature the
fake drawings as powerful evidence for evolution. See also Developing Deception.

That
peppered moths in an area of England, which went from being mostly light
colored to dark colored in the overall moth population, are evidence
for evolution occurring in the present.

The
truth: even putting aside the obvious fact that the moths are still
moths and thus no upward evolution could have occurred anyway, the
whole episode was staged to begin with!

Nevertheless,
Dr Wells has discovered that the staged photographs of dead moths
glued to tree trunks continues to appear in almost all biology texts
and is supposed “proof” of evolution working through the mechanism
of natural selection.

The emperor’s
evolutionary new clothes

In Dr Wells’s article,
based on his new book Icons of Evolution, he examines four additional
pillars that have also been knocked down (by evolutionists themselves)
and yet continue to be paraded in science texts as evidence for macro-evolution.
He writes that once “the false ‘evidence’ is taken away, the case for
Darwinian evolution, in the textbooks at least, is so
thin it’s almost invisible.”

Why does the textbook
charade continue? Dr Wells suspects “that there’s an agenda other than
pure science at work here.” He cites one motivation: adherence to atheism,
which is expressed
openly by evolutionary fundamentalist Dr Richard Dawkins, whom Wells cites
as saying that evolution makes it “possible to be an intellectually fulfilled
atheist.” Others hold to strictly naturalistic (i.e. no room for the supernatural
in science) and materialistic view of the universe. Therefore, opines
Dr Wells, philosophical, rather than scientific, views are what is motivating
the science textbook writers.

Baylor bails out
on academic freedom

Another article in
the current The American Spectator features a scathing commentary
on the decision by the president of Southern Baptist-affiliated Baylor
University in Texas to succumb to the “mob rule” of evolutionary zealots
on his campus and fire the director of the Michael Polyani Center because
he dared question evolutionary dogma. The center’s former director, Dr
William Dembski2, was hired to investigate the concept of intelligent
design in nature. Even though he and the center did not promote Biblical
creation at all, the very questioning of evolution made him the victim
of intense ridicule and eventual academic censorship by his colleagues
(see our related story).

At one point in the
heated campus controversy, university president Dr Robert Sloan even remarked
that the uproar by Baylor professors “border[ed] on McCarthyism.” And
in an April 20 article, Dr Sloan stated that “I believe there are
matters of intellectual and academic integrity at stake here … We should
not be afraid to ask questions, even if they are politically incorrect.”

Eventually, however,
the president’s call for academic freedom apparently lost out to expediency
in order to placate his hysterical faculty.3 While this could be (sadly)
expected on a secular campus where freedom of expression is often thwarted
when evolution is challenged in even a small way, this
shameful firing at a professing Baptist university makes it an even sadder episode
and reveals the general decay of Christianity in America today.

Footnotes

Including the popular
high school textbook Biology co-authored by leading anti-creationist
Dr George B. Johnson (the text is in at least its fifth edition).

A demoted Dr Dembski
remains on campus as an associate research professor.

If you would like
to write a respectful, inquisitive letter to Dr Sloan, write to: Dr Robert
Sloan, President, Baylor University, Waco TX 76798 or send an e-mail to
him at [email protected] If you happen to be a Baptist, you may
want to mention that in your letter as well.